Plenary Talks

Tracing the Specter of Semilingualism in Contemporary Language Education Policy

Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania

In this presentation, I trace the rise of the raciolinguistic category of the so-called “semilingual,” a racialized bilingual student who purportedly lacks proficiency in any language. After providing a broader history of the raciolinguistic ideologies that make the categorization possible, I identify its immediate origins within debates surrounding the War on Poverty that shaped the passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968. I examine the ways that the remedially oriented accountability system associated with the BEA that relied on a dichotomous framing of students into those deemed eligible for bilingual education and those deemed ineligible for the program was a primary mechanism for the production of the so-called semilingual and trace its legacy in contemporary language education policy pointing to the ways that contemporary framings of racialized bilingual students continue to maintain white supremacy.

On the Form and Function of MERGE

T. Daniel Seely, Eastern Michigan University

This talk explores the form and function of the most fundamental operation of the Narrow Syntax, namely Merge. First, we'll give a history of structure building devices, from PS rules through successive stages in the development of Merge--from its introduction in Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 1994/95) to its formulation in Problems of Projection (Chomsky 2013, 2015, see also Epstein, Kitahara, Seely 2015) and finally to its most recent characterization, as MERGE—note upper case (Chomsky 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020), Epstein, Kitahara, Seely (2018, 2020). Next, we trace the "Maximize Minimal Merge" program (Epstein, Kitahara, and Seely, among others): The idea is to maximize the effects of Merge, while minimizing its form, positing internal to the Narrow Syntax as little as possible beyond simplest Merge (Merge(X, Y) = {X, Y}). Finally, we consider the current ‘state of the art’, in the form of MERGE (i.e. Chomsky’s most recent characterization). MERGE applies to the Workspace WS (which is formally recognized and incorporated into the theory) and not directly to syntactic objects themselves. We provide a detailed examination of this re-conception of Merge, tracing its form and function, and certain challenges that it may give rise to, and also revealing important consequences in a number of empirical domains, and its implications for the theory of Narrow Syntax.